Warlock Wolf / Bring The Night / Chapter 3

Black rubbed his forehead, saying, “A chimp attack? Sure. That woman who got her face bit off that time in Connecticut.”

Maddie said, “It’s a little more elaborate than just having her face ripped off. There’s a primal energy at work here, an understanding of damage, but it’s a profound understanding. Chimps will go for the genitals, they go for the eyes and the hands . . . The things that it knows have the most value to its enemy.”

“So what are you saying? That it was a chimp?”

Pris snickered, then covered her mouth.

Maddie said, “No. Not a chimp. But primate energy. A simple spirit, yet one with an understanding of hurt.”

“So somebody knew how to hurt this guy. . . . So what? Who doesn’t know how to hurt someone?”

“We’re not talking about someone, Agent Black.”

He resisted rolling his eyes. He said, “You said it’s a spirit?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“A spirit. How great,” he muttered, and let his eyes wander, saw Lizzy running her fingers over books on the bookshelf.

Boston said, “Housekeeper heard a crash. She called the cops right away, stayed in her room. She has a piece with her up there, an old .38 she’s got. Used to be her husband’s. Husband’s dead now, but he was the groundskeeper. She hears screaming, some banging downstairs. Then it stops. When the cops get here, this is what they find.”

Black nudged his chin toward the dead man. “Is he one of the Cartwrights?”

“Ekaterina says he isn’t. Showed her a pic of his face on my phone—didn’t take that well—she doesn’t know who the guy is. And she didn’t let him in.”

Goody was looking around the room, too. She parted a red velvet curtain and now they saw broken glass and slushy snow scattered on the floor where it had been hidden by the drapery.

Black said, “Guy broke in.”

Boston nodded. “Guy broke in, or someone else did.”

Black said, “Then what? Is this some kind of sacrifice? The pentagram and all...”

Goody let the curtain fall closed again. She said, “It’s a conjuring.”

Pris asked: “And whatever got conjured didn’t like being conjured?”

“Some kind of demon chimp?” Black said sarcastically.

Maddie said, “No. . . . It’s a conjuring, but it was incomplete.” She was peering at the man’s face and Black came to stand behind her. He’d been avoiding looking too closely at that horrible, devastated visage, but now he was doing it. Where the man once had eyes were now just black, bloody cups. Something had stabbed his eyes out with a small knife. Something had pried his eyeballs right out of his head, liquified them. Something awful. Something evil. His airport burrito did a loop-the-loop in his stomach and he had to look away.

Boston said, “You gonna be okay?”

“Just fine. I’ve seen worse,” he lied.

Maddie said, “This pentagram drawn on the rug, and these candles, they’re a preparation for a spell, maybe a conjuring, but the finalizing items are absent.”

He swallowed hard, nodding like he understood what she was talking about.

Lizzy returned now, standing over the body saying, “An assassin. A magic assassin.”

Maddie said, “Yes. You could be right.”

Lizzy pointed now to one of the bookcases where she’d been perusing. She said, “You see a tome missing from there?” They all looked and could see a black space amongst a long line of similar red-leather books, looking like a slim missing tooth. “I think he came here for that,” she continued, pointing with her toe at the dead man.

Black said, “Set of encyclopedias? Came here to look up ‘magic assassin,’ did he?”

“No,” Lizzy said, and he suddenly regretted being so petulant. Now he was listening to her, feeling his tension ease. She said, “This man is a magic assassin. I know, Agent Black”—she licked her lips as if she was affected just as he was, and the act of saying his name was as thrilling as if he’d said hers—“he might not look like much . . . Magic assassins don’t have to know karate, don’t have to be a sniper, or some intimidating muscle-bound dynamo. He or she just has to know books. . . . Has to know books and has to know magic.”

Pris was looking down at the deceased. She said, “You know who I think this is?”

Maddie said, “The toymaker?”

Pris brightened, like she was glad she wasn’t the only one who’d thought of it. “Yeah,” she said, studying the man’s ravaged face.

Black said, “Who’s the toymaker? . . . Sounds like a super villain.”

Boston was looking at the man now too and he said, “No, Black, literally the toymaker. In the village of White Chapel. He makes dolls, he has a toy store on the main street. Handmade vintage type stuff, turn-of-the-century Victorian things. Dolls and carts, rocking horses...” To Pris he said, “You might be right. He was so cut up I didn’t think of it before.”

Maddie said, “Who would want the toymaker dead?”

Pris said, “You think the toymaker could have been a magician? How would we not know?”

“I think he could have been,” Maddie said. “But you’re right, how would he live in this town with us and we didn’t know it?”

Lizzy’s mouth twisted up as she stared at the corpse. “Then again, maybe he wasn’t.”

“Look at this,” Maddie said now, pointing near the small of the toymaker’s back—the man lay on something, back arched, stomach thrust out. “Deputy Boston, would it be all right if we lifted him a little?”

“Don’t tell nobody,” he said, looking over her shoulder. “I’ll give you a hand.” Boston kneeled on the other side of the toymaker, put his hands on the man’s bloodstained belly and rolled him a half-turn toward himself. Maddie reached in the gap and pulled free a doll.

Black stepped back suddenly, that nausea working over him again. He said, “That’s ghastly,” feeling uneasy seeing the doll. It was a girl’s dolly with a red mop of hair. It had dead blue eyes that lolled around on its face. He hated it; it made him want to leave the room, and he couldn’t imagine any little girl would squeal for it. He took a step back.

Maddie nodded, watching him and smiling. “You feel that? Black Magic.”

He rubbed his mouth and nodded in return.

Boston let the man roll back flat again. “That was under him,” he said, “but it’s not bloodied.”

Maddie turned it over and over. “It is a little. I think he fell on it, bled out around it.”

Boston said, “So it’s not the murderer.”

Black laughed. “You think a doll could murder somebody?”

Boston shrugged, made a wide-eyed expression like Anything is possible.

Maddie spoke slowly, like she was trying to see it all in her head. “This man—the toymaker—was conjuring. This was his vessel,” she said, thrusting out the doll. “The spell was incomplete. He was going to assassinate someone else.”

“With a doll?” Black said with disbelief.

“That’s right,” Maddie said.

Lizzy said, “That’s how you do it.”

And for some reason now Black accepted it, or at least was willing to hear them out. “Okay,” he said.

Maddie continued, talking in that slow way, brow down and eyes focused yet faraway, like she was picturing the murder happening. “So the guy comes in here in a hurry. He breaks in...” Now she pointed at the library shelf where Lizzy had noted the absent book. “He needs that book. I don’t know how he knows it’s here, but that’s what he came for. Like it was an emergency. Comes in, makes this haphazard spell, drawing a pentagram on the carpet with what looks like the ashes of maybe one of the Cartwright’s long-lost uncles.”

Lizzy said, “It’s funereal ash all right,” and Black looked to see her standing by the desk with a brass urn in one hand, its lid in the other. She upended the urn, and only a thin cloud blossomed, then faded. 

Maddie pointed to the saucers at the pentagram’s intersections. “He lights the candles, he’s casting the spell, or about to.”

Lizzy took it up now, saying, “But somebody knows he’s doing it.”

Goody said, “It’s like a showdown, or a duel.”

Now Black was picking up on the energy, adding, “But they’re better than he is, whoever he’s fighting with.” Boston stood with his hands in his pockets, watching as each one took their turn piecing it out.

“Right,” Maddie said, “they beat him to the punch.”

They were all silent for a moment, each of them frowning and looking around the room.

Pris broke the quiet, asking, “Wait, did the other magician use a doll, too?”

The girls all raised their eyebrows.

“Hey,” Lizzy said, and they all looked to see her use her toe to push out from under the desk the missing red leather book.

Goody kneeled down again, looking at the toymaker’s hacked genitalia. “Little knife wounds.”

Maddie held up the doll a little warily. “This might be capable of holding a knife, I don’t know . . . And . . . wait, wouldn’t . . . hold on, what would stop the doll?”

All the girls assumed looks of puzzlement and concentration. Then they began to furrow brows with worry. Boston bristled. The girls looked furtively around the floor.

“What’s wrong?” Black said.

“It won’t stop,” Maddie said.

Lizzy said, “It’s still here,” stepping away from the desk, one hand moving to clutch the leather strapping that held that long canvas-wrapped bundle on her back. She moved warily, like someone who’d spotted a mouse.

“Oh, come on,” Black said now, having a sudden strange feeling like this whole thing was an elaborate setup to fuck with the new guy. They’d heard he worked robbery before and didn’t know what the O-Branch was about. So they dressed up one of the other cops like a murder victim, he lay out on the floor and they were all trying to get the fresh-meat to freak out and believe there was a devil doll in the house, a little knife-wielding Chucky that liked to stab your balls.

He laughed and smiled, shook his head in admonishment and met all their eyes—only they didn’t let him off the hook and break out laughing. Nor did the guy on the floor pretending to be dead start snickering at the ridiculousness of the whole deal.

Boy, they all had gone to a lot of trouble; the murder makeup was very convincing. And, wait, the guy who was playing dead had stripped down and showed his dick to everyone? Like a bunch of young girls from the college...? . . . That sounded like a surefire way to get a meeting down at HR, maybe have them tell you to clean out your locker. That broken window—in a mansion like this, that tall custom glass would probably cost two-grand to replace. Way too much  money for a dumb hazing prank.

Black licked his lips, seeing no humor at all in the girls’ eyes, only conviction and concern. “A doll?” He needed clarification: “You mean there’s a homicidal doll somewhere in the mansion?”